Wreckfest an SSD Wrecker? (8GB update. Again?)

WPxNJ · Dec 10, 2020

Maybe I'm a little over protective of my new 512GB, Steam dedicated San Disk fancy SSD.

Should a game (I rarely play BTW) be doing a 6GB-8GB "update" 3 times in what seems like less than a month?

Got to be a better way.

Ole Marius Myrvold · Dec 10, 2020

Some game engines packages the gamefiles in big files. If you do one tiny change on one line of coding, the whole thing needs to be downloaded again.

You see the same with Codemasters-games as well.

Slapped · Dec 12, 2020

I used to be wary of SSD write endurance, but then I looked at it in a realistic use case scenario and realised that really there's nothing to be that worried about.

If you're just using that SSD as a steam game library then in theory it'll outlast you.

Let's assume the worst case scenario that the SSD is the cheaper lower endurance QLC type. This type typically has a write endurance of 1000, meaning that you can overwrite a cell 1000 times before it gives out. Given that it's a library drive you'll probably never exceed 2 complete overwrites during it's lifetime even with regular large updates.

For example if Wreckfest had an 8GB update everyday then a 512GB QLC drive would last just over 175 years before it would be worn out. A TLC drive would last far longer. Also be aware that in many tests SSDs have far exceeded their specified write endurance, sometimes by a factor of 3 or more before bad cells start appearing.

As a general rule with SSDs try to keep around 10% to 20% of the drive free as this gives the wear levelling and garbage collection algorithms headroom to work with and will enable your drive to carry on giving you good performance.

Before anybody pipes up, I know that SSDs are over-provisioned in that there's a certain amount inaccessible storage reserved for that purpose, but in many drives it's barely adequate and I've seen major slow downs in SSDs that are close to being full.